Following the beginning of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, senior government officials across the West spoke a bombastic game about the future impact of sanctions they were preparing in response. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire boasted, “We are waging an all-out economic and financial war on Russia… We will cause the collapse of the Russian economy.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke of an epochal Zeitenwende–turning point—that would erect a permanent international cultural, financial, and political Iron Curtain around Vladimir Putin’s pariah state.
To say the least, this braggadocio hasn’t aged well. As the mainstream media is now frequently forced to admit, Western sanctions on Moscow not only failed to produce universally forecast economic devastation, but revitalised domestic industry and increased wages for average citizens. In May, The Spectator begrudgingly observed,
“Russians are spending more on restaurants, white goods, and even property—they’ve never had it so good.” Meanwhile, Europe, electively cut off from the country’s cheap energy supplies due to those sanctions, is deindustrialising at rapacious speed.
https://mronline.org/2024/08/07/collapsing-empire/
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